It's hard to imagine how this could be faked short of digital manipulation, and it seems implausible that it would be a known high TC superconductor because it would warm up too fast. Absent the former explantation, I'm starting to believe this is real. Also, it's not like all the author's are unknown hacks. Hyun Tak Kim has about 10k citations (Google scholar, which sometimes combines people who have the same name though) and authored a paper in scientific reports which got L&K interested in collaborating with him. The guy seems to know superconductivity so I'm feeling rather optimistic about this.
1. This video is originally from an anonymous Douyin account. There is no verification that it is associated with a real replication attempt, from traditional academia or citizen science. There is a previous video on the channel showing the partial levitation more common to LK-99, but it likewise has no particular evidence it's not just a flake of pyrolitic graphite. It is claimed to be associated with a specific person but no evidence is provided. There is no reputation to be lost if this is a fake.<p>2. In the video, while the effect dynamics look quite good for flux pinning, there is some really concerning artifacting on the alleged LK-99 piece while it bounces. Specifically, it looks like it may be attached to a taut horizontal string that has then been edited out, but they didn't successfully rotoscope over the parts very close to the alleged LK-99 piece during specific moments. This could just be a compression artifact, I have never seen one like this but apparently this is a capture of a capture by the time we can access it, and I don't use Douyin or Bilibili so I wouldn't have a lot of familiarity with what their compression artifacts look like.<p>Basically, I am pretty sceptical about this video in specific. I do think LK-99 is more likely than not at this point, but I also think it's more likely than not that this specific video is not real.<p>I also think it's extremely likely that as LK-99's profile raises and VFX editors get more familiar with what exactly a real video should look like, convincing fakes are going to be produced and go viral. The most common way this happens is that the VFX artist does it as an exercise and shows a few people without ill intent, but the video is then reposted by other people a few times until it reaches a wide audience who has no chance of knowing its origin. However, there are some scammers/influencers who are good with VFX and can fake a video themselves.<p>Basically, be a little bit careful about video, and things you should want are: the camera is moving around the piece and not static, the light changes during the video, the pieces themselves are moving, you see the pieces getting set up or finished later, and there's stuff moving all around the object to make strings less likely.
In the lk99 subreddit, a higher res video was posted <a href="https://www.douyin.com/video/7263715495256378659" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.douyin.com/video/7263715495256378659</a>
Someone linked to this on the manifold market: <a href="https://imgur.io/a/AY1oaIO" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://imgur.io/a/AY1oaIO</a> it does look a bit weird to me but I am not expert enough to tell if this could be explained by optical/compression effects.
is it possible in theory that flux-pinning could occur without actually causing superconductivity? because LK-99 seems to be decoupling alot of properties we thought were coupled if I'm understanding correctly?
An oddball question for the device physicists here:<p>Assume for now (subject to verification, of course!) that this material is a non-Cooper-pair superconductor.<p>Could one still build Josephson junctions -- and SQUIDs -- from this material?<p>If the answer is "yes", it's going to make a whole lot of magnetotelluric geophysicists very, VERY happy.
Forgive me, I know little about these things, but what’s the relationship between this phenomenon and the quantum locking seen in other super conducting magnets, this looks as described as “pinned”, what would allow it to behave like the famous video of the magnets levitating around that circular track: <a href="https://youtu.be/Ws6AAhTw7RA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/Ws6AAhTw7RA</a>
It's possible that I misunderstand, but I think the title is a little inaccurate. Flux pinning goes beyond just levitation. In the embedded video we can see that the sample is not just levitating freely above the magnet, but it levitates above a certain fixed point. After gently poking the sample we can see it returning to its original position and orientation.
The sample most probably sticks to a flexible membrane above the magnet (to something like a transparent contact lens - one can even clearly recognize a round circumference on the magnet plate surrounding the green junk).
What I like most about this development is that, suddenly, folks with "CEO " or "Founder " in their Twitter bio look uncool, while folks with "<hardscience>" in their twitter bio are uber cool.<p>Note to pedants: yes yes, the Venn diagram has an intersection.